5/8 TIME AS A RHYTHMIC PECULIARITYOF THESLOVENIAN MUSICAL TRADITION

by Igor Cvetko

Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, Metelkova 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

The appearance of 5/8 time in Slovenian singing, and partly also the instrumental tradition, is one of our ethnic peculiarities. Why is this rhythm, which is significant for us, not found beyond our southern border? And why is it found in Europe most often in the Alps, the Basque region, Pyrenees, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, where presumably even today live a large number of descendants of the former inhabitants - the "Celts"?

The late Dr. Valens Vadušek, an ethnomusicologist, tried some years ago to answer the above questions in regard to 5/8 time, which he provisionally named "the Celtic substratum".

To make the study even more interesting, the map of the regions of the greatest concentration of tunes in 5/8 time, is identical with the map of the areas where hip displacement of the female infants is found more frequent than elsewhere. It is known that this anatomical anomaly is hereditary . . .